Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Butler

Butler’s complaint about words lands like a sigh disguised as advice: language is a fundamentally compromised tool, but you don’t get to opt out. The sly brilliance is the analogy to “our neighbours.” It drags a lofty philosophical problem down to the street level, where irritation and necessity coexist. You may fantasize about perfect expression, just as you may fantasize about better people next door, but the fantasy changes nothing about the shared walls.

The line also telegraphs Butler’s larger temperament: skeptical of pieties, wary of moral grandstanding, and allergic to the idea that clarity is ever total. “Not as satisfactory as we should like them to be” is an understatement that does serious work. It acknowledges a gap between experience and articulation without turning that gap into tragedy. Instead, Butler offers a kind of pragmatic ethics for communication: since words are imperfect, the real test is how we choose to use them.

“Make the best and not the worst of them” is the quiet sting. It implies that people routinely do the opposite: weaponize ambiguity, hide behind technicalities, spin motives into meanings. In a late-Victorian world of expanding print culture, public debate, and moral certainty sold as progress, Butler’s caution reads as both critique and coping strategy. Words will fail, and they will be bent; the only agency left is restraint, charity, and a refusal to turn linguistic limits into an excuse for cruelty.